Star Citizen deep-dives development and rewards, promises more info on 3.5.1 ‘soon’

We hope you really wanted to dig down into the guts of Star Citizen this week because on the latest Inside Star Citizen, Cloud Imperium is doing just that. The studio pops around to interview multiple sets of devs: some working on ship damage effects, some working on the exceedingly not flashy network code do-over, some working on harvestables. The video also touches on upcoming unique helmets for supporters (like the skull helm shown above), the Banu Defender, microTech architecture, and of course, the interiors on the 890 Jump.

Worth noting is that CIG has been a bit mum on 3.5.1 so far, but yesterday, the studio posted to confirm that it’s not been forgotten.

“We absolutely still plan on releasing a 3.5.1 patch and are actively working on it. While I don’t have an ETA right now – hang in there – we’ll have more information very soon!”

Watching the weekly video, the emphasis on shield degradation, complex condition damage and the deliberatele preservation of a ship shows to how important and how difficult it may be to obtain assets from these vessels. It also eludes to ship boarding and salvaging mechanics playing a big role in both gameplay and economics.

This concerns and delights me because it leaves the impression and almost confirms that ships are going to be expensive to obtain in-game, which means fairly low mission payouts, heavy ‘grind’ and time spent where after obtaining a ship, maintaining them is a another heavy gold sink. Sure, there will be lots of non-combat occupations to accommodate this but a lot of it focused around affording travel expenses.

Let’s hope they’ve taken the lessons learned from games like Eve Online, Archeage, Albion , etc. where player run economics (like the real world) can easily segregate a playerbase from the ‘haves and have nots’ and in order to survive, you need to join a large protective and support body of players. Really looking forward to this.

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3 months ago

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Melissa McDonald

interesting that I don’t hear those snide “pay to win” remarks for this game much when it’s more like that than any game I know of.

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3 months ago

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Godnaz

When you actively sell in-game currency (even in small increments, as a time saver) and land plot markers where pledgers can grab ideal land before you can, you can’t really say it’s not ‘pay to win’. Make not mistake that Star Citizen has it. We can snide together, can’t we buddy?

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3 months ago

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deekay_000

i wanted to follow up here to say that speaking out and giving feedback that this game should follow on the footsteps of division franchise and diablo’s 3 lessons learned rather than rehash at least part of the problem with anthem and make the game feel unrewarding.

34 was a good start. things feel good now. you can play casual and feel space rich.

i think if i spend $50k into a truck for business stuff that truck should net regular income that makes that investment worth while if i do it by the book. that shoudl remain true for even in the aurora in star citizen – we’re Star citizen’s not working in the factories of lorville for peanuts citizens. lol

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3 months ago

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Roger Melly

Haven’t you heard according to CIG ” you win by having fun” .

However I am not sure how much fun it will be if you are continuously getting ganked by people who are willing to spend thousands of dollars on a ship .

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3 months ago

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deekay_000

maintenence fees have long been said to be marginal on their own and we see that in game now.

salvaging won’t be stuff most players process for reuse at all even if players can ever process them at all – it goes back to that npc driven economy.

salvaging is more like mining than looting someone you just ganked in eve so to say.

beyond that it will be more cost effective hopefully to preserve your ship (and your life) for a variety of reasons beyond your normative grind/penalty stuff copy pasted from mmorpg to mmorpg over the past 20 years. and that’s the thing – we have plenty of design docs and indications and implications in dev statements and in game mechanics both early iteration and placeholder in this direction so far- at least to a degree.

and ofc there’s death of a spaceman.

but i’m not sure how you derived that ships will be a major grind to obtain out of it all. for your average soloable but crew oriented ship on the outside of things functionality wise – ie the connie, it’s not a bad grind at all right now. it wasn’t that terrible at all in 3.4 either.

but is the game pay2win? ofc it is.

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3 months ago

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Roger Melly

“in order to survive, you need to join a large protective and support body of players”

Or in other words large impersonal guilds where there is an internal hierarchy of people who take the game too seriously and have forgotten how to have fun together .

Sounds bloody awful .

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3 months ago

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deekay_000

in case anyone is wondering – usually there’s a .1 patch within a week or two tops of the milestone deployment. many suspect they are holding it back to include the 300i variant reworks kind of like with 335 last year. they have been deploying server side and client side hotfix patches since the deployment.

anywho.. this week i participated in production of a video for the anvil arrow ship ad contest and it was pretty fun experience even if the director had to pull the plug on the project for real life reasons and a bit too big scope for some shots i guess. but it was really fun and got some nice video of my own, including a rare arrow kill.

which that video(below) also features the player bounty hunting system in action. basically the director showed up to the set with lvl 5 crim stat and the server started generating bounty contracts to come kill him. kind of threw a wrench in getting the shot list for the evening done but did produce this gem for my own channel:

we also shot a canyone/ravine chase bit which i captured from my perspective as always and thought was a fun bit:

and did a bit of mission running after testing the mix/fixed thing to just get enjoyment of my sabre while i had those gimbals equipped on her, ran into a pirate npc hammerhead and decided to tool about. anyways things are calmed down alot from teh freefly weekend wonkiness and generally back to still broken in alot of spots and still not amazing server uptime but at least somewhat enjoyable as a kick back and farm some shit while looking at pretty shit game.

remember folks, at the edge of space, vengeance is best served cold.

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3 months ago

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Paragon Lost

Watching the first one right now, is that latency/lag I’m seeing while you are keeping up to the Anvil Arrows? You’re behind them then your next to them then you’re behind them. This is during the first 45 seconds or so. After that the dog fight was fun to watch. :)

If it’s latency I hope they fix that, because in 2019 I find that unacceptable. Dog fighting in Airwarrior back in 1992 on GEnie I could accept that sort of lag with 2400 to 9600 baud modems. hehe.

Now to watch the other videos.

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3 months ago

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deekay_000

hey this is a great observation and question that is directly relevant to the ship ad production not panning out.

in this particular bit the director was giving us instructions to speed up or slow down while trying to fly in formation (in a straight line) so alot of what you mention is us trying to match speeds manually, but there is also the visible jitter and what not that gets worse in this sort of thing as a server rolls down towards bad states. and this was kind of the “too big a scope for the state of things” bit combined with a few other scenes he had planned.

generally it does affect pvp in terms of hit detection and such as well as pve in the same spot but more so with the npc ships jittering and not quite behing right (they behave more properly on fresh servers mostly)

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3 months ago

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Paragon Lost

Ah ok, so it was a combo of you all trying to fly in formation and some server to player and back latency going on. Definitely a concern when it comes to pvp for sure.

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3 months ago

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deekay_000

i want to note the guy flying backwards is doing so on purpose as well in case it may not be clear to the casual observer (hes the camera man and he has the camera on the nose of his ship) lol

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3 months ago

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Solaris

Nice work. I cant wait for the new 300 model to be in game. I’ve been having a blast in SC since the last patch. I went on a bounty mission and ended up in an intense 10 minute dogfight with another player. I ended up having to escape when my wing was visibly blown off my Cutlass.

Looking forward to the new patch!

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3 months ago

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deekay_000

i actually hate 10 minute 1v1s but im glad you enjoyed it. but its awesome you saw your ticket was up and got the heck out of there like a smart person who values their lives should.

and noting if you havent tried gimbal assist cycle through modes until you have some broken circles around your center reticles and use it kind of like fixed but only when within 1km or less

which the cutlass does pretty decent with gimbal assist and a stick but my buddy was able to figure it out as a mouse pilot too, and hes super green to 35 still.

i do this sort of thing too so i empathize with them. i’m thinking – they got a rattle in the manifold that keeps recalling ps2’s vanu purple suited people because honestly i can’t disagree the memetic connection isn’t obvious. lol